By Praniti Gulyani
June 13, 2021
The Girl
She was an emotional kind of girl, the kind of girl who would cry very easily. She was the poet kind of girl, the word-loving, sentence savoring kind of person who would often have ink-stained fingers, and bruised palms, scraped with the sharp ends of the words that she would deal with on an everyday basis. She was the tall, lanky kind of girl, the isolated, misfit kind of girl. In simpler terms, she was the heart and soul kind of girl. But despite all of this, she was the scared, tremulous kind of girl. The kind of girl who would jump at the sight of a lizard, sob at the sight of spiraling staircases where the stairs seemed to morph into each other and the comfort of a ground was so distant, it seemed painfully maternal. The world would call her an enigmatic, insane, difficult-to-understand kind of girl. The eyes-glazed-with-riddles, cheeks dappled with footprints of unshed tears kind of girl.
The Teacher
She was the erudite, learned kind of woman, the kind of woman whose eyes would moisten very easily. She was the wise kind of woman, the teacher kind of woman who would stride through the school corridors with a raised chin and elegant steps. She was the angry, strict kind of teacher like the schoolmaster of Anne of Green Gables. She was not the teacher kind of teacher, she was, in fact, the wordsmith kind of teacher, who would not focus on the perfection of the phrase as a whole, but sculpt every syllable into a sophisticated perfection. She was the English kind of teacher, punctuating text messages with commas and semicolons, reciting poetry and fiction with divinity and sanctity, almost as though they were hymns.
The Girl
She was the messy kind of girl, the scattered necktie-and-scattered soul kind of the goal. She was the ‘scattered necktie goes with a scattered self’ kind of girl. She was the girl with locks of hair skidding out of the confinements of metal clips and touching her shoulder, a clothes-don’t-matter-as-much-as-your-heart kind of girl. She was the inside and outside balanced kind of girl, the-I am-what-I am-kind of girl. She was the Pippi Longstocking kind of girl, the outspoken, angry and loud kind of girl. Not the loud kind of loud, but the silent kind of loud, which involves the rage of a furious blizzard as it tries to escape the confiding embroidery of the human heart, where it’d been so firmly stitched.
The Girl
On a crisp, autumn afternoon – when the sky was looking upon the world with bleak, emotionless eyes, the emotional kind of girl tiptoed into the English kind of teacher’s class. With eyes holding pink clouds of dream and thought, the emotional kind of girl listened to the narrations of fiction, waged wars within the confined boundaries of grammar exercises, pushed for the freedom of prose and poem, and maliciously seized the fair face of writing paper. Her word-loving, sentence-savoring kind of self was dangerous, alcoholic, consuming – and the fair face of writing paper was the element of rehab. The emotional kind of girl wrote as though her life depended on it, as though every word held a bit of her breath, a bit of her soul, a bit of her existence. And, as the girl wrote with an angry, ferocious madness, the teacher watched. It is almost as though the fair face of writing paper is aflame.
The Teacher and The Girl
The teacher is holding the flaming paper between her fingers. It is not easy to tighten one’s fist around fire, but the teacher does that. She looks at the pulsating scrawls of ten-year-old madness and calls it poetry. She calls it works. She calls it literature. She calls it art.
The girl looks at the teacher with eyes-glazed-with-dreams. The teacher looks back. She puts away the flaming paper as though it is a Kohinoor, and gives the girl another fair faced paper, and tells her to create another fire. And instead of making the flames orange, make them blue-green, she says. The girl takes the paper with outstretched palms. The paper is a synecdoche, where the part represents a whole – and the whole in this case, is a legacy, a gift bestowed upon on the sentence savoring kind of girl by the wordsmith kind of teacher, a point of their mutuality, a common dream. . .
The whole is in fact, a little voice in both their hearts, which softly says –
‘We want to become a writer, when she grows up’
Praniti Gulyani
Praniti Gulyani is a seventeen year old girl from one of tbe most vibrant and colorful places in the world. She likes to call herself "a woman of words and verse", and aspires to become a full time author when she grows up. Praniti has been published in over thirty literary journals around the world, and holds laurels in all spheres of creative writing. She is a Gold Finalist Awardee in The Queen's Commonwealth Essay Competition conducted by The Royal Commonwealth Society, London. Recently, two of her poems won honorable mentions in the prestigious Nancy Thorp Poetry Contest conducted by Hollins University, USA. Praniti wishes to teach creative writing someday, and bring more youth into this beautiful world of literature.
Commentaires